The posting of copyrighted material

[Bumper]

We are getting an increasing number of copyrighted articles being posted here and we need to stop it. The verbatim posting of these articles are illegal and can cause us a lot of problems. Over the next few weeks I will be going through the forum either editing or deleting many of violations I find. If you have a thread that is edited (or deleted) for us to comply, you will not be notified as that would be a lot of work.

Further, I will be adding an infraction for those that repeatedly post copyrighted material. Once cleaned up a member will have their post edited and be issued a warning. After the first warning, a hefty non-expiring infraction will be imposed.

[DefensiveCarry.com]

[Kyle18]

I must assume this includes all "text" articles. Do photos from web sites fall in into the copyright or intellectual material rights area as well. I.E. pictures, of firearms, holsters, videos, from manufactuers, etc? I just want to be clear as to what is acceptable and what is not for the purposes of this forum.

Respectfully
Kyle

[Varmiter]

Pictures fall into the same category.

As a case in point. Suppose you post a picture of YOURS here. As soon as it is posted, it falls under the copyright of THIS site, and of course you. The copyright notice appears at the bottom of every page here. IN THEORY, if someone copied your picture and used it in another thread on the same site is a grey area. But if copied to another forum, then that is illegal.

Company logos are not allowed without the Company’s permission. Say you are a Ruger fan and decide to use the Ruger logo as your avatar. Legally not allowed unless you have Rugers permission. However, in a case like this I imagine Ruger would happily accept the free advertising your spreading of their logo creates. But technically, it is illegal.

The following link is to an article that Bumper edited to keep it legal.

Fixed Article............

Make no mistake folks. There are a fair number of sites that have received a summons. The fines can be very hefty. Many news sites are now watching carefully for copyright infringements.

Chris
Tucson Gun Rights Examiner
Conservative Examiner

[DaveH]

url links are our friend!

[DaveJay]

Anyone who thinks this isn't a threat to this site has their head in the sand...

Having said that, I want to ask if the following is acceptable as it is the process we followed on another site...

If a new site has a story we wish to discuss, it was generally acceptable to copy a few lines as a part of a post, along with the proper url link..

The poster then had to summarize the rest of the story...

Is this acceptable?

[Hopyard]

For Bumper and all. I just want to point out that anything written by Uncle's employees isn't covered. That goes for court rulings as prepared by a judge, Federal rules, statutes. But caution is needed as sometimes it isn't so easy to tell what is original work of a Federale and what is creative interpretation by a reporter.

[varob]

Is former President Bill Clinton's name copyrighted?

[WhoWeBePart1]

Well seems I'll just stick to posting links to news articles and making up my own headline. I post a lot of news articles and copy and paste the text verbatim 99% of the time but I don't want it to cause headaches if that is the case. I have hot linked a few pictures but if a site does allow me to hot link an image I don't see how that is a copyright infraction. I'm only posting the URL to the image. I'm not saving the image to my hard drive and then hosting it on a 3rd party site such as http://photobucket.com

I'm pretty positive I will get a warning but time to change how I post news articles and images.

[SIGguy229]

Gotta love lawyers....

[oneshot]

Gotta love lawyers....

^^^^^^^^^^^Yeah^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

What a sad state of affairs, that even when you are giving credit to the person whose work or article it is, it creates a problem.


What a world we live in







If the folks at the psychic hotlines were really psychic, wouldn't they call you first?

[shockwave]

If a new site has a story we wish to discuss, it was generally acceptable to copy a few lines as a part of a post, along with the proper url link..

That is the definition of "fair use" and is legally acceptable. The problem is with articles copied and posted verbatim.

[Bumper]

If a new site has a story we wish to discuss, it was generally acceptable to copy a few lines as a part of a post, along with the proper url link..

The poster then had to summarize the rest of the story...

Is this acceptable?

That's pretty well what I had in mind, with the exception of the "summarize the rest of the story". But that's a good idea. Consider it added. It helps resolve a pet peeve of mine which is simply posting a simple link and making no comment on the article.

Is former President Bill Clinton's name copyrighted?

No, but it is covered by our rules regarding politics, unless it's gun related....

[ccw9mm]

Message understood.

Gotta love lawyers....

It really doesn't have anything to do with "lawyers," though they have described the property reality as "copyright law." Writings are the property of writers and publishers, by virtue of their ownership and agreements. Rights to control the works don't stop the moment another can read it. It's simply the right of ownership, the right to control the disposition of one's own work.

Simple quotes and links with a brief summary should be easy to do, for anyone. Clicking on a link ain't so bad. Of course, as articles come and go there will be "dead" links that'll affect threads. Though, that's not under our control. That's just one of the realities of the internet.

[shockwave]

Simple quotes and links with a brief summary should be easy to do, for anyone. Clicking on a link ain't so bad.

Not only is it not bad, it's how the Internet is supposed to work. As Tim Berners-Lee originally conceived it, all relevant content would eventually be linked. The reader follows the links. Today, with our broadband access and fast computers, for most people following a link is a 1-second detour. Opens a new tab, which you can read (or not) and close, and you're back to where you started.

It was never intended that if a person saw an interesting article, that they'd copy it in full, and repost it. In that way, you get needless duplication of content. You also get removal of context. Like Bumper, I also prefer it when the title of a post gives me a good idea of what it's about, and if there's a link, that there's a description of what it's about.

Because of the Armed Citizen situation, a lot of sites have suddenly grown skittish about quoting. It's possible to go overboard. FloridaConcealedCarry forum just instituted a total ban on any quoting whatsoever. That's ridiculous. Up to a paragraph with a link back to the source is fully within Fair Use guidelines. Armed Citizen was in the habit of reposting articles in full, and it was their gathering and reposting of entire articles that constituted their "product." If there was ever a case of blatant copyright infringement, they're the poster child for it.

[ccw9mm]

Not only is it not bad, it's how the Internet is supposed to work. It was never intended that if a person saw an interesting article, that they'd copy it in full, and repost it.

Yeah, well. The original inventors of the linked method lacked foresight in two areas: (a) that the directory structures of target computer systems would prove to be highly changeable in practice, breaking links with each change; and (b) that the need to copy/paste data from links would prove to be about the only real method a person has to avoid (voluntary or other) corruption of the target data. A copied/pasted news article won't break due to a bad link. And, imagine the WikiLeaks type web sites of the world, if corrupt gov't hacks and officials could simply change the data and sidestep reality. Though, none of this is much of a problem, with discussion forums, in that the discussion more the point, rather than the linked information.